BOOK REVIEW of Benedict XVI’s A Reason Open to God: On Universities, Education and Culture

FATHER C. J. MCCLOSKEY

A REASON OPEN TO GOD

On Universities, Education and Culture

By Pope Benedict XVI
The Catholic University of America Press, 2013

336 pages, $24.95

To order: cuapress.cua.edu

In May comes graduation days. Commencement time offers a moment for reflection on the purpose of higher education — especially in our Catholic universities.

And every year we watch the Catholic universities to see who the commencement speakers are, and we dissect the ways they honor or detract from a university’s mission.

What a Catholic university’s mission should be is an oft-debated topic, but we needn’t look far to find a guide to measure our critique.

All three of our most recent popes, from Blessed John Paul II to Pope Francis, have had extensive experience in higher Catholic education as professors. Indeed, John Paul may well be considered the finest philosopher in the history of the papacy, and Pope Benedict XVI certainly ranks high as a theologian, particularly in his work of the ongoing rediscovery of the Fathers of the Church. In one way or another, we could refer to them as “university men.”

The Catholic University of America Press has done us a great service by publishing A Reason Open to God, with Pope Benedict’s teachings during his pontificate. The book has a foreword by the president of Catholic University, John Garvey, who has continued the fine work of his predecessor (now-Bishop David O’Connell of Trenton, N.J.) in reconstructing CUA into a truly Catholic university.

This collection is of particular value to Catholic Americans, as one of our finest boasts was that we had by far the largest collection of Catholic universities in the world, at least through the decade of the tumultuous ’60s. The majority of these universities were staffed by thriving religious congregations, both male and female.

Then, out of the blue, a revolution took place in 1967 that changed Catholic higher education radically, but we hope not forever. It was known as the Land O’ Lakes Conference, for that is where a group of Catholic college presidents and academics undertook a revolution in Catholic education that hopefully will someday (soon) be rolled back.

The Land O’ Lakes document began this way:

“The Catholic university today must be a university in the full modern sense of the word, with a strong commitment to and concern for academic excellence. To perform its teaching and research functions effectively, the Catholic university must have a true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself. To say this is simply to assert that institutional autonomy and academic freedom are essential conditions of life and growth and indeed of survival for Catholic universities, as for all universities.”

Now compare this with Pope Benedict’s address to Catholic educators at Catholic University in Washington on April 17, 2008:

“It is the case that any appeal to the principle of academic freedom to justify positions that contradict the faith and the teaching of the Church would obstruct or even betray the university’s freedom and identity and mission: a mission at the heart of the Church’s munus docendi and not somehow autonomous or independent of it.”

The contrast is clear. We can only hope that our bishops in each diocese with at least a nominally Catholic college or university will address the matter under the leadership of our new Pope Francis.

This book contains all of Pope Benedict’s talks on the subjects mentioned in the title, with the great majority being given in the context of pastoral visits throughout the world. I found most interesting those talks in England, on the occasion of his trip to beatify Blessed John Henry Newman, with whom Pope Benedict had a special relation as a fellow theologian. In his homily, Pope Benedict used Blessed John Henry’s own words to describe the goal of Catholic university professors:

“I want a laity, not arrogant, not rash in speech, not disputatious — but men who know their religion, who enter into it, who know just where they stand, who know what they hold and what they do not, who know their creed so well that they can give an account of it, who know so much of history that they can defend it.”

Would that all of our universities yielded such young men and women, the earth would be ablaze with the truths of our faith!

All in all, this book deserves a place on the bookshelves of every Catholic teacher, student and parent — and its words a place in their hearts.

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Posted by Gloria Schotten on Wednesday, May, 22, 2013 2:51 PM (EDT):

Raphael, you put it simply and it’s as simple as that. As GK Chesterton put it; I love my Catholic faith like I love my Whisky - straight and undiluted!

Posted by rafael padilla on Wednesday, May, 22, 2013 1:17 PM (EDT):

academic freedom,open mind,religous freedom are nothing but the right to be wrong and to choose that wrong as your guide.These notions are the vangard of error and our catholic educational system adopted these ideas. What a travesty.

Posted by Peter on Wednesday, May, 22, 2013 1:08 PM (EDT):

A Catholic university is not only faithful to Catholic truth, but also notices that part of this fidelity, the Catholic Social Thought, is largely an endorsement of the truth of classical natural law directly accessible to human reason(not the later Enlightenment redaction separating liberty from responsibility).

The New Evangelization offers a real future to Catholic academia and to enrollments(!)—as a countercultural message with appeal to anyone who sees the long-term and even immediate bankruptcy of secular humanism which is now the de facto “established” religion of our nation. Land O’ Lakes erodes freedom as no more than “academic,” by choosing favorable peer reviews from within the clan over real human freedom.

Modernity in the West assimilates itself to the invasion of ethics-free technology and political centralization (e.g., the HHS mandate) in the same way the Islam assimilated itself to the Byzantine notion of the unitary Church-state (the Mosque-state), and to the tribal habits of early Arabia and the later invasions of even more warlike Turks and Mongols.

In contrast, the Catholic adherence to “the deposit of faith” is capable of polivalent inculturation, but without mindless and soulless assimilation with trends of the moment. It is faithfulness to Man (male/female) because it is faithfulnees to God. A rich field for Catholic academia, once academia rediscover that it is the truth that sets us truly free. Subsidiarity is but one long-neglected theme of Catholic Social Thought waiting for scholarly attention less shaped by the narrow criteria of productivity and efficiency . . . and government grants.

By juxtaposing the Land o’ Lakes appeal to academic freedom with Benedict’s warning against the abuse of this freedom, you make it seem that Catholic higher education must necessarily put limits on freedom of inquiry and freedom of publication by professors, and thus you reinforce the stereotypical notion that Catholicism is at war with freedom. How unfortunate. What Land o’ Lakes was saying was historical: that Catholic universities in this country had in the past been quite weak academically, as John Courtney Murray had famously argued in the 1950s. My own impression—and these things are merely impressions—is that these Catholic institutions remain fairly weak today, while often rejecting the Church’s teachings, so that we now have the worst of both worlds. Are these schools free, academically? Absolutely yes. Is this freedom compatible with fidelity to the Magisterium? In principle, yes, but often the two are in conflict. The solution to this problem? It consists in affirmative action efforts to recruit faculty members who are devout Catholics—something the most prestigious of our Catholic universities have utterly failed to do for decades now—and then to allow each professor freedom of research and expression, subject to criticism by the community of scholars when he goes astray. The community is what’s important here, not the individual professor, and our Americanist, individualist refusal to see the importance of community or its role in criticizing errant faculty members, bringing them back to the Truth via fraternal correction, is really at the heart of the problem. This is why so many American Catholic universities fail to reconcile Faith and Academic Freedom. Most are either academically free and fully or partially secularized, or quite loyal to the Magisterium and dreadfully weak academically. In both cases the root cause of the problem is the heresy of Americanist Individualism.

Posted by Doug on Wednesday, May, 22, 2013 12:25 AM (EDT):

The passions of the Catholic universities soon infected Catholic high schools. Many Catholic high schools are college prep factories, private schools for wealthy families who are fleeing public schools. While there are faithful Catholics there, it seems secular success is a driving force. The relatively new Jesuit high schools of the Christo Rey network are an exception to this. Those are dedicated to being Catholic, rigorous and dedicated to serving the financially disadvantaged. Too many Catholic high schools are winning state championships and are the high schools better public school districts want to have, but can’t.

Posted by Robert A.Rowland on Tuesday, May, 21, 2013 7:18 PM (EDT):

Great revue and knowledgeable concern for Catholic higher education.

Posted by Michael J Donnelly on Tuesday, May, 21, 2013 6:36 PM (EDT):

Really appreciate Father McCloskey’s insights

Posted by Gloria Schotten on Tuesday, May, 21, 2013 3:17 PM (EDT):

The Boston College situation yesterday upset me so much, where are these people’s minds and hearts, certainly not with the Church; such an outrageous thing. I have been in contact with Boston College and Enda Kenny, sent some pretty rough emails including pictures of the two aborted babies that were so brutally savaged and cut to pieces, their little heads
Punctured and brains out and exposed, let alone things that were so graphic to explain. And this man Enda is going to make abortion legal in Ireland, a Country that has always been prolife and it is enshrined in the Irish Constitution. This is very evil.
Yesterday I was lead to this from the Psalms while I was in Prayer, such poetic justice in the Bible.
Psalm 94: 1-4; 20-23…... O lord,thou God of vengeance, shine forth. Rise up, O judge of the earth; render to the proud their deserts!
O Lord, how long shall the wicked, how long shall the wicked exult.
Can wicked rulers be allied with Thee, who frame mischief by statute?
They band together against the life of the righteous, and condemn the innocent to death.
But the Lord has become my stronghold,and My God the rock of my refuge.
He will bring back on them their iniquity and wipe them out for their wickedness;
And the Lord will wipe them out.

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